The Attention Merchants: How Our Time and Attention Are Gathered and Sold

At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a
new level: two billion monthly active users. That number, the
company’s preferred ‘metric’ when measuring its own size, means two
billion different people used Facebook in the preceding month. It is
hard to grasp just how extraordinary that is. Bear in mind that
thefacebook – its original name – was launched exclusively for Harvard
students in 2004. No human enterprise, no new technology or utility or
service, has ever been adopted so widely so quickly. The speed of
uptake far exceeds that of the internet itself, let alone ancient
technologies such as television or cinema or radio.